Waiting and Hoping

WAITING AND HOPING

The Book of Isaiah is a story of how God’s people live in hope, waiting for God. There are times that they start to trust in their own strength and turn away from him, and there are times when they are reminded to turn back to God, and when they do, they are mightily surprised by him, and it all comes into focus in this message in Chapter 30.
God had been calling upon Israel for more than fifty years since the days of King Uzziah to take on a non-reactive role in international politics so that they could be given a new place of being God's spiritual representative as his servant to the world. and this role becomes clear in the later chapters of Isaiah, ‘arise shine for your light has come’ (Ch.60). 

He called for a willingness on the nation's part to stop gazing out at the other nations and getting involved in their chaos and disorder and to rather search inward to find faith and to rest in God's grace and commitment to grow them and form them and do them good. He had said he would make them the head and not the tail, and that they would be above and not beneath (Deuteronomy 28:13). The world around them would then see that God was with them. God had his timing for Israel to position them in the best possible way and much would be expected of them, but they had to learn to hear God.
In the following Scripture we see a cry from God’s heart to the people of Israel (and also to us). He was speaking through His prophet Isaiah, and He said:

Isaiah 30:15 For the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, says: Only in returning to me and waiting for me will you be saved; in quietness and confidence is your strength; but you'll have none of this.
‘No,’ you say. ‘We will get our help from Egypt; they will give us swift horses for riding to battle.’ But the only swiftness you are going to see is the swiftness of your enemies chasing you! 
18 Yet the Lord still waits for you to come to him so he can show you his love; he will conquer you to bless you, just as he said. For the Lord is faithful to his promises. Blessed are all those who wait for him to help them. You shall weep no more, for he will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. He will answer you.
20 Though he has given you the bread of adversity and water of affliction, yet he will be with you to direct you, and with your own eyes you will see. And if you leave God's path and go to the left or to the right, you will hear a voice behind you say, ‘No, this is the way’, so you can walk in it.

These words were said to God's people during a time when they had become tired of waiting for God to do something and were agitating to organize things for themselves. but God was waiting for them to do nothing! They were in a position where there was a fierce army from the north that was about to come and plunder them – and they were planning a political alliance with Egypt. But they had been told by God to wait for him to act on their behalf - 'In quietness and confidence you shall find your strength'. 
This would require quietness in the midst of turmoil, and trust that God would control the great forces that were devastating the world around them. That would be a braver and wiser kind of leadership than trying to control the politics of the day. 

It is the same with us as his people in these challenging days we live in now. We don’t sit around passively but we let him position us in his way and in his time. There are good things that are God things that God has ordained for us to do and we need his wisdom to make the right decisions at the right time.
The Holy Spirit teaches us that wise activity comes from a place of peace not emotional reaction or ambitious ideas that come from self-importance.

The final blessing in verse 18 is dedicated to those who are willing to listen and who wait.
‘Yet the Lord still waits for you to come to him so he can show you his love; he will conquer you to bless you, just as he said’.
What Jesus conquers in us is our independence from him as a savior and friend and brother. God had engineered a situation for Israel in which no matter how much skill and ingenuity they thought they had, they were acting without his direction, and they were not only going to fail but they were going to make matters worse for themselves and come under God’s judgment. God does this kind of thing for a reason for all of us because there are some things that are just beyond us, beyond our ability to solve. But we still try – and we still fail. 
God is waiting for us to wait for him.

God assured Israel that he wanted to take them back again to a place of hope where he would look after them. He repeats to them that He will do good to them. He concedes that He has allowed them to go through tough times of adversity, and that He has even contrived it for a good reason, but that now it is time for rest and peace to come to them instead of anxiety, and that when they cry out to him, he will hear and act.

God is saying the same to us in this time of anxiety and uncertainty that has come upon the whole world, where there is strife and contention on many different levels. People are in conflict and causing offence to one another over things that once would never had bothered them, and the emotion that gets attached to the offences gets amplified by all forms of media to stir up political and relational strife in the community and even in families. It seems like everybody is waiting for something good to happen because too much bad and sad has happened, and they don’t know how to make the good thing happen because the world is broken and so are they. 
And God’s wants his people to know that they are not here to ‘fix’ the world but to bring healing to the souls of individuals and families and the community, to bring hope for those lives to become fulfilled and meaningful, trusting in a loving God.
The hope is that God wills to do good at this time in this world for all that call upon him with a true heart, to bring rest for their souls, and it is only when we are in a place of peace that we can impart this living hope to those around us. 

Philippians 4:6 Let your steadiness and calm be seen by those around you. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Does this Scripture mean that God will give us the answer to every prayer that we pray?
No. This Scripture tells us to wait for the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.
So why don't we wait? 
Well, just like Israel - we feel we can't just wait around and do nothing - we must solve the problem our own way and try to make something happen or maybe decree things in God’s name that he hasn’t authorized and then end up anxiously waiting to get the answer we want. We need to receive God’s peace first.

How does this peace give us hope?
When we know that there is a person that we can trust in totally to look after all our needs and problems in the best way possible, we can be at rest and let them do what they know is best for us. That allows God’s peace to sweep over our souls.
When we wait and receive that peace it becomes the signal that God has arrived on the scene. Suddenly, we see things in a different way – we lose our anxiety and fear, and we re-gather hope and expectation for things to change for the better – better than we could have ever planned for them to be. We can then live with the hope that he will surprise us with his outcome because his gift of peace guards our hearts and guides our minds saying to us; And if you leave God's path and go to the left or to the right, you will hear a voice behind you say, ‘No, this is the way’, so you can walk in it.

This becomes something that we learn, sometimes the hard way, that God waits for us to wait for Him, to give us his peace!
God also loves to share that moment with us of showing us what he has done for us, and to reveal more of himself to us so that we can get to know him better.